David Allyn's Make Love Not War, subtitled The Sexual Revolution: An Unfettered History, is a must-browse for anyone interested in the social and cultural history of American political movements. The 1960's of lore and legend mixed promiscuous sex and free love with drugs, rock, and the pursuit of pleasure. So you can imagine my surprise when Allyn challenged my perception of the 60's by noting that norms revolved around "modified forms of monogamy" rather than pure promiscuity. Though I knew that Timothy Leary had always been especially critical of promiscuity and charmed by monogamy, I considered Leary to be an idiosyncratic exception. As it turns out, I was wrong. In Chapter 8 ("In Loco Parentis"), Allyn explains why the 60's heralded more of a sexual rebellion than a revolution:
For hippies, sexual liberation meant not being preoccupied with sex. "You have to remember," says Jack Gelfand, a professor of computer science who graduated from Rutgers in 1965, "sex for us wasn't naughty or illicit. It was innocent.... For us, free love was about love, not just sex."
"Make Love Not War"-- it was one of the key slogans of the counterculture. But it was not a rallying cry for casual sex; it was, rather, an almost sentimental plea for harmony and brotherhood. If people would stop hating and killing one another and instead begin truly loving each other, the world would be a better place. Sex was fine, but "making love" was about far more than sex: it was about being profoundly related to another human being. As Bob Dylan advised Playboy readers in 1966, "Sex is a temporary thing: sex isn't love." Love was the central tenet of counterculture-- love of nature, love of life, love of oneself, love of love. Sexual intercourse was merely a way to communicate with, and express love for, another person.
For those who would like a taste test of this book, Allyn describes the Chapter 3, which looks at the long and twisted story of the birth control pill, is excerpted in full online. For those who would like to know more about Allyn himself, David Bowman's fascinating interview with Allyn for Salon.com is worth more than a taste. In this interview, Allyn briefly addresses the "sexual revolution/s" as played out in contemp:
People thought that it was really going to happen -- that you could find a rational approach to sex. That you could abolish jealousy. You could abolish all of our hang-ups and shame and fear. And that was the national conversation at the time. I think that is gone. I think people have found there are two ways to look at it. You could say people have gotten resigned, or you could say people got realistic.
One might gain a little insight into Allyn's seeming sexual conservatism knowing that his parents divorced when he was 4, that he went on dates with his dad, that he has an 18-month daughter, that this book began as his history dissertation, or that his own sexual experience has been as complex as most:
The first time I had sex I thought to myself, Wow! Now I see why parents don't want their kids doing this. It almost seemed so animalistic. Our whole civilization is built around this pretense that we don't go to the bathroom and we don't masturbate and we don't have sex like animals do.
Allyn's most valuable insight is his strong distinction between free love and free sex. Contemporary culture a la Maxim tends to conflate the two. Liberation from sexual repression is a far cry from a compulsion to "muck around" (to borrow the Aussie term) with the bar-hopefuls. When En Vogue lyrics come to mind, the post/conversation must be put out of its misery. Alternate accounts of the 1960's are welcomed.
